American - Historian | May 16, 1934 -
As someone who has more than a passing acquaintance with most of the 20th century presidents, I have often thought that their accomplishments have little staying power in shaping popular views of their leadership.
Robert Dallek
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Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.
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Coming out of WWII, there was the assumption, the hope, the vision of a world at peace, of a kind of Wilsonian universalism, that we and the Soviets would get along, we'd have a kind of lovefest for as far into the future as anyone could see.
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Ronald Reagan in foreign affairs, I think, was someone who had certain, very general ideas, general propositions by which he lives: To combat communism, to build up the American military power to assure our national security against any conceivable threat.
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Late 19th-century populists saw bankers and industrialists manipulating markets to enrich themselves at the expense of small farmers and labourers and favoured political candidates promising economic relief through free and unlimited coinage of silver.
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Nowadays, everyone seems to have a blog that finds readers.
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John Kennedy had so many different medical problems that began when he was a boy. He started out with intestinal problems... spastic colitis.
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The Atlantic conference in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland is a dramatic moment in World War II history because for the first time, Roosevelt and Churchill are meeting face to face in this war.
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I think the most important thing that comes out of the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in early 1942 is a commitment on Roosevelt's part to fight Europe first. To struggle first against Germany and put Japan and the Pacific as a secondary theatre in the conflict. And this is what Churchill was after.
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McGeorge Bundy was a brilliant man who'd had a meteoric academic career and was the youngest man ever to be dean of the Harvard faculty. But he was also arrogant and looked upon all sorts of people and politicians as not to be taken all that seriously.
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Historians will look back and say, 'Foreign policy in the Ford presidency was very much dominated by Kissinger, with a kind of continuity from the Nixon period.' Ford is not going to be remembered as a really significant foreign policy maker.
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Vietnam was a palpable failure. And of course, in retrospect, it was even more clearly a disaster and a failure than maybe people understood at the time.
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